James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson
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James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty. Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, and The American Conservative. He has published five books, including most recently, a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). Raised in the Great Lakes State, baptised in the parish of St. Thomas Aquinas, seasoned by summers on Lake Wawasee (Indiana), and educated under the Golden Dome, Wilson is scion of a family of Hoosiers dating back to the early nineteenth century, and an offspring of Southside Chicago Poles whose tavern kept the city wet through the Depression (and prohibition) years.  He now lives under the same sentence of reluctant exile as many another native son of the Midwest, but has dug himself in for good on the margins of the Main Line in Pennsylvania with his beautiful wife, dangerous daughter, and saintly sons. For information on Wilson's scholarship and a selection of his published work, click here. See books written and recommended by James Matthew Wilson.

Recent Essays

Novel, Myth, Reality: An Anatomy of Make-Believe

For Maureen Drdak, If she will accept it as part of our good conversation. Devon, PA. I shall be returning to the following subject frequently in the next...

Some Permanent Things

Devon, PA.  Here is a poem of mine that has just appeared in the poetry journal The Dark Horse and on Ernest Hilbert's ever...

Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic

Devon, PA.  During the next few months, I shall be writing on the centrality of beauty and art to a flourishing human life in...

Against “American” Home Ownership

Devon, PA.  Thomas J. Sugrue's new article in the Wall Street Journal proves considerably more nuanced and insightful than its headline and summary suggest. ...

The Eccentricity of the Saints

Devon, PA.  Earlier this week, some devout and worthy reader on the Porch proposed G.K. Chesterton as the patron saint of the Front Porch...

Convolutions in Veritate

Devon, PA.  In the near future, I hope to offer a few essays on Catholic Social Doctrine, and, of course, on Caritas in Veritate...

When Lawyers Catch the French Disease

 Devon, PA. No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped...

Foreign Beer at the White House?!

Devon, PA.  The Wall Street Journal reports one angle on what I just knew would become a controversy.  If it were the New York...

No Angel: Second Thoughts on Sarah Palin

East Lansing, MI. Mark Mitchell's brief essay on Sarah Palin reminded me of a Treasonous Clerk installment I wrote back in November, contemplating the...

Southern Adulteration

Devon, PA.  I have had only a few hours to appreciate the spectacle of talking-heads devouring the carrion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's...

Is Burke Our Intellectual Father?

Devon, PA.  Last week, Caleb Stegall's reprinting of his article on Community from the Conservative Encyclopedia excited a small objection that the genealogy of...

The Gain is Gloss: Thanks to FPR and Its Readers

Devon, PA.  Much like Jeremy Beer, I have found that FPR has led me to look at 'Blogs almost for the first time in my...